


It Might Not Be the Smartest Thing to Do, But You Should Follow Me

by Coffin Liqueur (HP_Lovecats)



Category: Digimon - All Media Types, Digimon Adventure
Genre: Developing Friendships, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Loyalty, Mild torture, Physical Abuse, Platonic Female/Male Relationships, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-11
Updated: 2020-05-11
Packaged: 2021-03-01 17:34:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23970889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HP_Lovecats/pseuds/Coffin%20Liqueur
Summary: Tailmon advised Wizarmon not to trail her out of his lonely world into hers. He wondered if it could really be so bad - and if it was, if that shouldn't simply mean that there was use for him there.
Relationships: Tailmon | Gatomon & Wizarmon | Wizardmon
Kudos: 15
Collections: Id Pro Quo 2020





	It Might Not Be the Smartest Thing to Do, But You Should Follow Me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Resilur](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Resilur/gifts).



She shut her eyes, bowed her head, and, giving him enough time to see her smile, turned away from him beside the charcoal remains of the fire. Her fur glowed subtly pink in the light of the oncoming morning.

The Tailmon answered his question with “I’m not entirely sure that you _do_.”

“And why not?” Wizarmon asked, tokenly, with a single step forward - not to encroach upon her space, but to assert his willingness to follow.

Her ear flicked; she turned to look back over her shoulder, and in profile, he saw that her smile had faded.

The painless openness of her eyes gave him the subtle impression that it was into curiosity, or at least thought.

He let his head drop. “There’s nowhere else I need to go,” he reminded her. “I can’t even remember the last person I’d spoken to before you.”

A strangely slow blink.

She took her own step forward - not to advance away from him, but to begin pivoting herself. To look up at him more fully, face unchanging.

He chanced, “Does anyone but me know the things you told me tonight?”

...Her eyes dropped. Flicked off to the side.

It felt like a moment to focus on when he shut his eyes; drew in a breath, and didn’t re-open them fully as he held a hand up. Just barely-out, shuffling the boot he had planted forward further.

“You saved my life,” he reminded her furthermore. “And from the way you talk, you’re tired of the loneliness.

“It may be unlikely that I’m the person you’ve been missing - but I want to see _if_ I can help you, too.”

He wrote off the selfishness that he felt as he said it, finding it irrelevant. It had felt as if more than his thirst for water and hunger for food, with the fish she’d caught, had been slaked that night, and that while he had gotten his fill of those things, in another regard, he had only had a small, sparing sip of water in a wasteland. Something internal _urged_ him to follow her. He _wanted_ something.

But there was no guilt, because at best, he would get it, and she would be paid back for it with something she needed, and that he therefore felt he inherently owed - anything he could offer. At worst, again, he had nowhere else to go.

No time or progress to lose.

He hoped that she understood that in the beat of eye contact that they held, before again, she dropped her head, eyes shutting and smile returning - knowing and tired and sage. “Perhaps it’s a very lonely place where I’m going,” she said, a shake of a similar kind of amusement in her voice, crossing her arms. A shake of her head. “It isn’t somewhere that you need to be.”

He couldn’t help but feel amusement shake in his chest. And in fact, he hoped he heard it, as he reminded her, again, tilting his head, “As opposed to…?”

Her eyes flicked back open.

Her look, now, was definitely thoughtful.

More _fixed_ than before.

He lifted his hand again, palm-up. A gentle shrug, keeping a little of the lift in his voice present, meant only to emphasize his certainty. His confidence that this was the route he wanted to take. “Wherever this place is, if it’s still lonely when we’re both there, then all that means is that nothing has changed.”

A little quicker and drier toward the end. More pragmatic.

She averted her eyes, then. Looked away into the trees. Her tail switched.

“There’s more to it than that,” she said. “It isn’t safe.”

“Show me.”

Safety was another point that felt irrelevant - such as to be a non-object. He’d been to many places, flown through storms and had close calls with dragons. He hadn’t expected to be saved when he’d landed in the streets on which she’d found him, and he’d barely been able to save himself in similar situations in the past. She was quiet after she’d conceded to, if nothing else, saving her time on her travels by asking him to fly her part of the way back once his strength was back up, while he was simply increasingly curious. She remained quiet during the flight once strong enough, he was.

During the flight, she pointed them to a large wood out of which protruded a ruin; directed him to land at its edge. She turned to him before the trees began, and told him that he could turn back at any time.

“All right,” he said, nodding but not understanding, not thinking.

He followed her still only _wondering_ as the trees grew denser, and the bushes grew black and gnarled and thorny, and sense of time diminished as the sky became purple, and then red. She looked back at him over her shoulder often, pawing through the brush, occasionally getting on all fours to hop over a hooking its way out of and again into the ground.

Chittering in the air.

He looked up. Bats flew by.

Dry branches rustled in their wake, ever so subtly. A whisper in the air over and around them.

He looked down to the back of her head - the faintest lean to try to look around to her face.

She turned it on him herself, her face open-yet-stern again.

He noticed her ears were pulled back.

“Wizarmon, find a place to camp for the night. It’s better you don’t follow me any further in. Don’t worry - “ Tossed her head in a shake. “I’m not leaving you stranded out here, after you’ve come this far. I’ll find you soon.”

He agreed again, still no more than curious, and watched her pounce ahead into gray wood and brambles and murk, resisting the urge to follow and watching the white of her fur disappear and listening until he could no longer hear the rustles in the plants by her paws and the sweeps of her tail anymore.

He did find a space in the woods in which to sleep, and found that time did, in fact, change in them. Eventually, he noticed the sky go purple again, and then black with tiny pinprick dots of stars. Then red again. The cycle repeated.

Tailmon did not appear again, all the while, and he had been right to imagine that being in a lonely place without her simply felt like being alone always had.

The only difference was that this time, he had something to muse on. He contemplated the bats as they passed by in intermittent shrieking clouds; Tailmon’s fear and avoidance and secrecy; the ruin that had reached up from the trees as they’d flown to the forest, reinterpreting it in his memory as a castle.

At some point, a rustling in the bushes was accompanied by his name, and his thoughts and eyes and being lit up at the still-fresh feeling of a slice through the solitude. He stood up as a small white cat bounded into his clearing - readily approached, repeating her name in kind and asking where she had been, without negative emotion.

“I had things to attend to,” she said, getting up on her hind legs and brushing twigs out of her fur.

She looked up at him and blinked twice, her eyes seeming somehow determinedly bright.

A moment of lucidity swirled between them and bent his thoughts into hers; Wizarmon felt as if he was dizzy before recognizing this as the presence of a power he had not slowed down to use in quite some time.

In her mind, he detected the presence of a powerful ruling Digimon in these woods.

* * *

Over the proceeding days camped in the grove, Wizarmon found that his desire to go anywhere had disappeared, because this wood had become the only place that felt different from anywhere else. He had only to wait, for no more than a few days at a time, and he would be rewarded by Tailmon crashing at him through the foliage; new frequent breaks in a previously utterly lengthy silence.

In a tentative effort to demonstrate to her that her visits did, in fact, make him happy, he greeted her with a joke for the first time. “In such a hurry to make our next meeting,” he’d said, smiling under the collar of his cloak with a warmth and vividness that he had not felt in long, “that you didn’t have any time to smooth your fur out, ah?”

Tailmon, truly disheveled with cowlicks of fur sweeping in contrary directions, a little nick across the bridge of her nose, and an ear bent at an odd angle - froze. The other ear pricked high; her paws tucked up faintly toward her chest.

Wizarmon’s smile turned into a frown and his brow knit; the warmth cooled and stiffened and clenched into unease as he wondered if he’d offended her.

He relaxed again, however, smiling again with a twist of sheepishness and chiding himself (for what, he wasn’t quite sure) when she, herself, relaxed - she huffed a small laugh through a scrunched nose and turned her head down, eyes closed.

“Well,” she said, stepping forward into his campsite, giving her coat two idle smooths, “for what it’s worth, I would be lying if I denied that these are the highlights of my days.”

“Mine, too,” he said, turning to watch her inspect their fishing basket, his voice under-layered by a sort of vocalized smile again - the warmth coming back in.

Slipping once again, subtly, on noticing a red diagonal gash down her back.

He downcast his eyes, a twinge of guilt tempering into doubt when met with the fact that, at least, she hadn’t been upset.

He likely should have known better, as it was common for her to meet with him at least partially-disheveled. Also common for her to do so sporting wounds. He’d come to suspect that she was a soldier, between the prominence of a name in her mind, and what had dawned on him his first few nights in this forest, and her almost dutifully and _sternly_ informing him, on one of their early hunts for food for them to share by fireside and ensure he would be well-supplied until her next visit, that one must absolutely not eat or harm the bats.

He thought to ask her, finally, as they sat by a black creek, her leaning over the water on all fours with a twitching tail and paw lifted to scoop, squinting for fish, and him crouched behind her.

“Vamdemon,” he said.

Both of her ears battered and pricked - she pushed herself up to face him straight.

There was a hardness in her eyes that widened his; he leaned back slightly, gloved hand coming up out of some reflex. “He’s in charge in this forest, isn’t he?”

Tailmon’s eyes pinched slightly, though her pupils weren’t on him.

She finally ducked her head into one of her soft, scoffing laughs, tugging a small grin.

“I haven’t mentioned that name, have I?” she observed. “Have you been reading my mind this whole time?”

That smile gave him the security to return one, gentle and unseen. “Only small thoughts, here and there.”

She nodded. “I should have expected a wizard to be able to do that.”

He saw her brow tense a moment before the smile slipped, and she turned her attention to the creek again.

“Vamdemon _is_ in power here; correct.”

The middle of her tail bow-bent one way, then the other.

“And you work for him. Is that also correct?” A small lean with the tilting of his head. “That’s where you didn’t want me following you - his base.”

She blinked somehow decisively.

Two more bends.

She hunkered down closer to the water. Squinted tighter. “I am one of his soldiers,” she said. Yet another two bends, quicker. “And it is for the best that you stay away from Vamdemon, even if I can’t. He isn’t a particularly kindly Digimon.”

She struck her paw into the water and leaped, holding up on her hind legs and juggling a sparkling, bony silver fish into a point of balance in the air before she slapped it, flopping weakly, onto the riverbank in front of her, a fang biting gently into her lip.

She left him that day with curiosity again, and the desire to follow her again. She hadn’t wanted to come with him to a lonely place, although perhaps if he had done so, she may have been less lonely. She didn’t want him, now, to encounter an unkind Digimon, because she knew, from direct experience, how unkind that Digimon was, and didn’t want him exposed to any of that unkindness.

When perhaps he could serve as a better counterweight toward balance there, too.

Technically, he did not need her permission this time to follow that draw, as its source was not tied to her, specifically.

And so he left the campsite, looking up at those tiny stars through bending branches and trying to forge a compass that’d point him where Tailmon had run without him after their initial arrival. He picked a direction and walked, staff hauling him through the brambles like an oar in the mire, until they gave way to an old castle that reached high - stones and the occasional pale circling Bakemon lit an infernal orange by the dotting of torch flame.

Soon enough, he knelt across a vast room from a throne seating an imposingly-tall and imposingly-dressed vampire Digimon, one hand on the floor. He muttered an oath, and punctuated it with a look up to where Tailmon sat beside that throne, white fur practically starlight-shining amidst the dark stone and shadow.

Her eyes were circular and jaw fallen open with lingering astonishment.

He met it with a knowing smile that he knew Vamdemon would not see, but hoped that she would make out in his eyes, under the brim of his hat.

* * *

That look she had given him may have been not astonishment, but horror, Wizarmon realized, dread tearing in his heart as he passed Vamdemon in the doorway of the chamber, tiny next to him even as their cloaks breezed together in combatting slipstreams - only in mind shooting the vampire a lightningbolt of a look while not daring, even if only for the sake of his own conscience, to take his eyes off of where Tailmon lay by the back wall.

She looked dead, Wizarmon noted as he approached, close enough to see her eyes locked in an unblinking glare directed at something that had been in front of her, face altogether pulled and tensed and frozen into a restrained snarl. All of the color had drained from her fur, the tips of her ears and tail faded to gray.

He could remain cool-headed, relatively-speaking, because he knew rather instinctively that she wasn’t. She would have broken down before his eyes, if not by the time he’d gotten here, and begun restoration in Primary Village if Vamdemon had pushed her that hard -

How quickly Wizarmon finished that logical conclusion without consciously walking through the steps.

He’d heard the lashing strikes of a whip. Made out places, now, where the texture of her fur had split.

In any case, yes, there was something he could do for her, specifically. That was most important. She was not dead, and so he assumed she was paralyzed. He had long ago learned a spell for this, although he could not remember causes, or names, or faces.

His hands bent into one shape, and then another, and then another, and then another, focusing cause, and energy, and purpose, which he finally directed with a flash-turn to both palms held forward.

Tailmon shone as the color restored to her coat, white brightening, grays richening back to purples.

A first sign of movement - she blinked slowly, groggily, as if waking from a sleep. Her snarl relaxed - likewise, as if it was merely from a stretch. Her limbs weakly pawed in the air, slow-motion.

Relief fluttered in his chest like air off the battering wing of a bird.

She lifted her head, still groggy-looking.

“Wizarmon,” she said mildly. He detected a surprise light and distant.

“Are you hurt, Tailmon?”

He asked it almost trying not to process what he saw.

In those splits in the level of her fur, with color restored, he saw clean, straight angry-red lines.

He processed it anyway.

He thought of the cuts she would come with on greeting him in the clearing outside the castle; the one she had had down her back on the very night either of them had said Vamdemon’s name.

The front of his mind simmered as he hated himself for not having followed her sooner, and produced a pouch of herbs from under his cloak.

* * *

“Vamdemon, please, I’m the one who made the mistake,” he said more fiercely than he had ever said anything, the desire to truly shout pulsing low down below his throat. He looked, half-turned, up at the vampire with what he meant to be hatred and he meant to be a plea, and was instead _pure crackling lightning_.

Vamdemon smirked and chuckled one low, condescending chuckle.

“...Then for your punishment, I forbid you to leave this room until I’m finished with _her_ ,” he said, extending a claw at the end of a long, reaching arm.

Wizarmon could not help but look, in a flashing reflex, out to where it pointed. Tailmon was circled by bats, and meeting eyes with him, her face wavered into a sorrow that he had not seen on her before.

He closed his eyes, breathed in, senses trembling but hoping to convey some resoluteness, in that perhaps it was only right that he didn’t leave.

“And _you_ , Tailmon,” Vamdemon carried on, “then need to learn a valuable lesson on keeping your _henchmen_ in line.”

The resolution snapped, and Wizarmon’s eyes snapped open electrically with it. He felt himself breathing a _“no”_ , but it never left his chest.

It seemed it was Tailmon’s turn to be resolute. She bowed her head gravely, and with a wave and turn of his hand, the bats began to close in, swarming, until he could no longer see her.

It was a mercy to him, although he did not like what his mind was picturing. He turned back to look at Vamdemon, and saw him still smirking. He did not like that, either, and pulled his face away with a flash of disgust that met the bats beginning to come apart - he saw white.

He hitched a breath - took one instinctive step forward, beginning to extend a hand.

“Stay, Wizarmon,” said Vamdemon; Wizarmon looked up wild-eyed at him again, and then forward again - waiting with a bracing dread and weighting himself forcibly to the spot, every bit of his data coalescing on itself and forcing him downward as to the vampire, his mind whispered a thousand defiant death-curses.

Through shifting black shapes, a picture put itself together. The bats had Tailmon by the ears, the tail, the neck, the shoulders, the sides - biting, some gnawing and pulling at fur and flesh, kicking with claws where they latched. Her face was braced with pain, as much as with the effort of holding still.

Tailmon had never taken a strike in a fight, in all the time he’d accompanied her, or observed her train. He had no doubt that she had never taken one before they had known each other, either. She was much too fast, too agile, too tricky, too much a decisive hitter not to avoid strikes and end fights far before she could find herself in any danger - and yet he’d so often seen her injured.

She had told him never to harm the bats.

She was holding to that here.

One of them _ripped_ away with a mouthful of white fur and she flinched; Wizarmon shut his eyes and willed himself re-grounded to the spot, a creature growling in his heart and a fist tightening until his whole arm trembled.

“Tailmon, say it,” said the vampire.

He could not hear it under the chittering and the battering and the squealing, but Wizarmon thought he could make out her back rising and falling with a large breath.

She ducked, slightly - wincing at the further tug it put on her ears. “ -- Forgive me,” she said, “ _Master._ ”

Her voice was wavered in its raising, and tensed by the pain, but mostly even. Exhausted from practice, and resigned.

He knew she didn’t mean it.

Hated that she had to say it, everything around his heart feeling as if it was plunging downward.

He stared into the cloud of bats with pain as if to take it on, sorrowful.

A momentary hitch and grit before she continued. “It was foolish of me - “ A hiss, before she finished, her voice still tight. “ - to defend my henchman… instead of punishing his mistake.”

Wizarmon heard something snap and _rip_ through the air.

He looked back up to Vamdemon in a flash - saw a blazing red whip swinging high from his hand.

He _shouted_ it inside this time:

**_No --_ **

The whip sliced its way forward and landed with a booming crack that exploded the cloud of bats apart in a thousand directions, and under it, Tailmon seized on the ground, yowling silently.

Inside, Wizarmon reeled. Gaped, as Tailmon twitchily began holding herself back up on her front paws, biting her lip. Inside him there was a silence that he told himself no one would make any room to break - held onto hard in his head.

It was broken. Another flash of red and an impulse twitching his limbs screaming at him to _run forward_ in the moment before the massive whip cracked down against Tailmon’s back again - as she was struck to the ground again this time, he heard a faint shocked cry that she quickly bit her teeth down over to hold back.

It wasn’t long before she moved to pick herself up again, on just one paw this time, her breathing heavy and ragged and her tiny body shivering with each one.

And Wizarmon whispered, internally, another rush of curses again, bitterly bitterly bitterly bitterly at the fact that he could not move - it would be worse for her than for him, if he did, he realized, and he now felt himself trembling all over. Both with that desire to run, and with one to collapse - fall onto his knees and insist that he was sorry, as if that’d break some kind of spell before -

The flash of the whip blazing through the air again - a sucked-empty void of waiting for the thunder.

It cracked explosively down again, and again Tailmon seized, and this time, she screamed.

Wizarmon insistently looked down - nothing visible before him through the brim of his hat.

He had never heard her scream before; never even in any of these sessions. He hadn’t heard it, and yet traces of it still _echoed_ off the stone.

He was trembling himself weak.

A rustle of sound caused him to look up nonetheless with a panic - his head snapped to his side; Vamdemon was moving forward, and the trembling tightened and every nerve set like a tightly wound trap as he reminded himself not to move. Not to breathe too loud, lest the vampire would start it all again.

Vamdemon leaned over Tailmon, where she no longer tried to pick herself up. Simply lifted her head - making small, weary, half-lidded fluttery blinks through stars of pain.

“You’re forgiven,” Vamdemon said, with that low hot-velvet condescension, “this time. In the future, don't dare forget that I expect _discipline_ in the Digimon I command, _and_ that I expect that discipline to be reflected in _their_ henchmen.”

A whorl of his cape in the air. Wizarmon watched him intently, the silence returning to his system and freezing there for dear life.

Vamdemon walked.

And Wizarmon continued to urge himself to not move, to not breathe --

...Up until the old heavy door closed with a muffled, distant-thunder boom.

...And Vamdemon was no longer in sight…

...And the silence was true, and left to them.

The coldest of relief poured through his blood as finally, finally, he ran toward Tailmon - finally collapsed next to her on his knees where she lay, wearily staring, covered with cuts and scratches and her fur uneven and slicked in every which direction. He fished his medicine pouch out of a pocket and let it drop beside him, wanting to say a million things.

Her name was the first.

“Mmh,” she said, with another weary blink.

He interpreted it as a _“proceed”._

He breathed fast as he fumbled with the drawstring of the pouch, looking for the first thought he wished to deliver.

Before he drew out any poultices, he drew out, breathy and along a ragged thread of pain:

“ -- I’m sorry…” and then, after a snag, quiet and shaking with the wonder that he felt he should add this out of _instinct_ , “...friend.”

...Her eyes softened.

She didn’t smile. Rested her head on her paws and kept her pupils trained on him. After a beat, “...You do know that I lied to appease Vamdemon, don’t you?” Her tail twisted, languidly, on the ground. “Defending you to him wasn’t a mistake.”

“I know, but -- “

Now she smiled.

He froze - mind gently, gently blanking.

Letting the floor be hers.

Another turn of her tail, and almost a restful, restful nudge of her head up against and between her paws. She took a long, slow breath…

...and then puffed, jaws open and tips of her teeth showing, one of her quiet, tired, rueful-yet-heartful little laughs.

“...You may not be the one I’ve felt I’ve been missing for so long,” she said, “but I wonder where you've been all my life, even so.”

...In the stillness inside him, he felt his next heartbeat in a warm, warm ripple.

...He smiled slowly, looking down at her with a fond sadness, a sad fondness, chest aching. Smile aching, sweetly.

You’re lying, he thought, with abashed, unworthy humor, even before she said:

“Everything you’ve done for me, Wizarmon, is everything I’ve needed.”

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from ["Follow Me"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOrFrK7Wvcc) by Sarah Bettens, which is a song that I realized as I was writing this gives me big... Tailmon & Wizarmon... _feelings_.


End file.
